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Exhibition District founder and executive director Erin Salazar of San Jose
is one of seven Knight Public Spaces Fellows. Each fellow will receive
$150,000 in recognition of their work. (Photo by Briana Gardener)

Four years ago, Erin Salazar launched the Exhibition District, an audacious idea to paint murals on some 40,000 square feet of blank walls in San Jose. Her plan was to raise money for supplies and to pay artists for their work.

Today, her success is evident on nearly every block downtown. While the Exhibition District hasn’t been responsible for all of downtown’s murals and other street art — Empire Seven Studios, Phantom Galleries and the San Jose Downtown Association have also played big roles — you can’t understate Salazar’s contribution to creating a more engaging city core.

For those efforts, Salazar was announced Wednesday as a Knight Public Spaces Fellow, one of seven nationwide. The Knight Foundation is giving each of the fellows $150,000 in funding in recognition of their work to create more engaging public spaces. The awards were announced at the Knight Public Spaces Forum in Philadelphia.

“These rare people see something different when they look at streets, parks and sidewalks,” said Sam Gill, the Knight Foundation’s vice president for communities and impact. “They see a vision of how our communities could look, feel and be different.”

Artists work on their portion of the 100 Block Mural Project at theValley Title building in downtown San Jose on Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019.(Sal Pizarro/Bay Area News Group)

Walter Hood, the creative director and founder of Berkeley-based Hood Design Studio, was also named a Knight Public Spaces Fellow. More than 2,000 candidates were nominated nationwide through a national call that launched in February.

Salazar, speaking by phone from Philadelphia, said she was “so humbled” by the award and thankful for her team at the Exhibition District — Operations Director Ellina Yin, who herself was honored this year as one of the Knight Foundation’s Emerging City Champions, and Project Manager Haley Cardamon, founder of the San Jose Day festival.. “I’m just over the moon,” Salazar said.

She said the team is looking forward to leveraging the funding to ensure more public spaces are places where the entire community can gather and are not accessible only to the rich and healthy. By working to create affordable workspaces for our creative community, Salazar said, “we can afford to retain the people who call this place home.”

Salazar’s work extends beyond murals, too. She helped found Local Color, an artists’ hub that included studio and retail spaces, which was housed for more than two years in the old Woolworth building on South First Street. With that building being developed, Local Color is in the process of moving its operations to the Valley Title building on South First and San Carlos.

That’s an appropriate new home since it’s also the site of one the Exhibition District’s most lauded works, the 100 Block Mural Project. The mosaic of 100 murals, each 3 foot square, was created in Februrary by artists from around the Bay Area and elsewhere.

Salazar graduated with a degree in fine arts from San Jose State, where she also founded the university’s fine arts club, the Dirty Brushes. She serves on the San Jose Downtown Association’s Historic District Committee and is also on the board of Friends of Levitt Pavilion, which is working to bring a stage with 50 free concerts a year to St. James Park.

Sal Pizarro has written the Around Town column for The Mercury News since 2005. His column covers the people and events surrounding the cultural scene in Silicon Valley. In addition, he writes Cocktail Chronicles, a feature column on Silicon Valley bars and nightclubs.

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